Our next concert

Saturday 25 November, 7pm – 8pm

St Cecilia 2017

Music for St Cecilia’s Day

Laura Vaughan, viols, (guest artist)

Josie Ryan, soprano

Brooke Green, director and viol

Fiona Ziegler, Catherine Upex, Annika Stagg, viols

Each year Josie and the Emeralds celebrate St Cecilia, Patron Saint of Music at the Glebe Music Festival. This year we bring arias from John Blow’s beautiful and rarely performed Ode for St Cecilia’s Day, 1691. Also, Monteverdi’s La Musica from his ground-breaking opera Orfeo with music by the magnificent William Byrd, the much-loved John Jenkins and the visionary Christopher Tye.

Our guest artist, the dynamic and acclaimed viol player Laura Vaughan is soloist for Brooke Green’s Reza Barati, a moving and dramatic portrayal of Reza Barati’s murder on Manus Island in 2014. In 2017, another refugee died on Manus Island: Hamed Shamshiripour. We premiere Brooke Green’s Hamed Shamshiripour: a setting of some of Hamed’s last words.

Shamim, Misbah and Batoh are three refugee girls trapped on Nauru who in October 2016, were featured in the Four Corners program The Forgotten Children. Since then, Brooke Green has written music intended as musical gifts for them. (Shamim was premiered at the Glebe Music Festival, 2016.) This year, the concert will include a performance of Batoh. (2017).

There are two more premieres by Brooke Green: Cock-a-hoop (a 17th century term meaning “to allow liquor to flow liberally”) and Chavela in honour of the singer herself. Chavela Vargas was a Mexican ranchera singer, greatly admired by Pedro Almodovar and featured in his films. Almodovar recently directed the biopic Chavela – an audience favourite at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival.